Wanderlust: Expat Life & Style in Thailand April / May 2017: Health & Wellness Issue | Page 26

Health & Wellness
DEMENTIA FROM A DISTANCE
From Bangkok, a son says goodbye to a father
who is 10,000 miles away and fading fast.
By TED ANTHONY
I
t was January 2014. My father, be-
set with Alzheimer’s Disease for
four years, was entering his final
18-month slide. I found myself with
an opportunity to live and work in
Bangkok, the city where he had taken
my mother, my two older sisters and
my newly widowed grandmother in
the summer of 1955.
When he left five years later,
Thailand had changed all of their
lives. I wanted to bring my wife and
young boys to the same place, to turn
our children into the kind of global
citizens that growing up in my family
had made me.
I went to my 91-year-old father — a
pioneering linguist who taught teach-
ers at what is now Srinikarinwirot
University and co-authored the first
English-language textbook for teach-
ing Thai, the man who taught me how
to think. I asked him how he’d feel if I
moved to Bangkok.
“Bangkok,” he repeated unsteadi-
ly, his eyes cloudy. “I’ve been to
Bangkok, haven’t I?”
My stomach fell. How could I
move now? How could I go from
living 10 minutes away to living
10,000 miles away? How would I help
him manage his final days?
Five minutes later, I asked him
again. It is the strange quality of
Alzheimer’s that it fades in and out,
stealing loved ones away and then
returning them as if they’d never left.
“Bangkok!” he exclaimed. He was
smiling. “We lived in Bangkok, and
26 WANDERLUST
now you will, too. This is what we
raised you to do.”
You may know the challenge
of long-distance relationships. But
the challenge of trying to care for a
dementia-riddled parent from afar
is a unique experience that changed
my own life.
¬ ¬ It is the experience of maintain-
ing an American mobile phone —
always on, always with you —
and thinking that every 3 a.m.
phone call from the States is that
phone call.
¬ ¬ It is the experience of coming
home to a man who once crossed
the Khyber Pass in a rickety bus
and finding that the first thing I
had to do was to help change his
diaper.
¬ ¬ It is the frantic